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With T-shirts at work, you can’t always say what you want

In 2011, Southern New England Telephone suspended 183 employees who refused to remove T-shirts that said “Inmate” on the front and “Prisoner of AT$T” on the back. The National Labor Relations Board sided with the phone workers, but the company appealed the NLRB’s decision in federal court. AT&T defended its one-day mass suspension because the T-shirts “could cause customers to believe that AT&T employees were actually convicts.” AT&T might as well have argued, “We’re the phone company, we don’t have to think it's funny.”

This week, the federal court upheld AT&T's T-shirt ban, ruling that, even if people don’t think the phone company employees are fugitives from a chain gang, the message on their shirts “may harm AT&T’s relationship with its customers or its public image.”

The public image that the phone company would like to project looks something like this dependable Norman Rockwell lineman that AT&T commissioned for its advertising, who wears the kind of clothing that the public back then might have expected a lineman to wear:

“He helps to get the message through.” This Norman Rockwell lineman, used in company advertising, was supposed to engender trust in Bell Telephone.

No one in their right mind would see the prisoner T-shirt and think this:

In reality, when people think of AT&T they’re more likely to imagine this:

Still, the Court of Appeals ruled that AT&T doesn’t have to prove the prisoner T-shirts caused actual harm to its image, just that the company has “a reasonable belief that the message may damage customer relations.” The ruling shouldn’t be surprising, because the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment don’t apply to the workplace. Nonetheless, AT&T's heavy-handed dress code remains troubling.

Employers can tell you what you can and cannot say at work, and what your clothing can and cannot say, as well. As the court noted in its ruling, AT&T requires its employees “to present a professional appearance at all times and to refrain from wearing clothing with ‘printing and logos that are unprofessional or will jeopardize’ the ‘Company’s reputation.’”

But AT&T let workers wear T-shirts with slogans like “If I want your opinion . . . I’ll take the tape off your mouth!” and “Out Of Beer. Life Is Crap,” despite the fact that such shirts may not help get the message through that communications workers are dedicated professionals. The court found that T-shirt messages like “Support your local hookers,” with “an image of a fishing lure,” were not as “problematic” as the prisoner tees, and besides, the company is free to enforce its professional T-shirt rule selectively:

No case holds that a company that on some occasions has allowed unprofessional clothing to be worn by employees is somehow estopped from prohibiting other unprofessional clothing.

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) [Song of Myself, sec. 51]

Apparently AT&T, which no longer contains the multitudes it did back when it was Ma Bell and hired Norman Rockwell to get its message through, thinks that it’s professional for employees to wear clothes that joke about prostitution, drinking, or gagging kibbitzers, just at it’s professional to gag employees whose T-shirts lampoon the company. It’s not surprising, too, that the shirts AT&T found offensive were ones supplied by the employee union, the Communications Workers of America, given the current anti-union mood of many employers, politicians, and the Court of Appeals.

All of which underscores the precarious legal position of workplace speech, as employers manage not just what their workers do, but also what they say, where and when they say it, sometimes even the language that they say it in. Get the message?

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Comments

The damage to AT$T's public image appears to have been achieved by its own appeal to the courts. Wouldn't it have been a better choice of action to have had a sit down with the employees about the message? Sounds to me like AT&T has trouble with internal communications as well as external.